The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.

Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.

Mmmmm. Info Snacks

Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.

Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.

Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.

Sure, you could create a report and a press release that talks about the good works of BCBS. You could probably even get a reporter to write about it in the local paper, or the TV station to grab some footage of the line for flu shots. But that’s not “atomizing” content (in the words of Todd Defren from Shift Communications). That’s siloing content.

Instead, you could create:

A blog post about how immunizations work, and whether there’s a danger of injecting people with live virus.

A blog post about the effectiveness of immunizations in controlling infectious disease.

A blog post about the history of immunization.

A blog post that compares the impacts and benefits of various types of exercise (aerobic vs. anaerobic, etc.)